On 7/18/11 2:04 AM, Eli Zaretskii wrote:
>> Yes, the change would make Emacs Unicode-only --- but every Windows OS
>> in common use supports unicode.  Why would requiring unicode support be
>> a problem?
> 
> Two reasons: (1) we still support running Emacs on Windows 9X, where
> the Unicode file APIs are (AFAIK) not supported, even if unicows.dll
> is installed

The 9X family is long dead.  There's no vendor or driver support;  I
don't know how I would even go about testing 9X support.  We shouldn't
forgo technical improvement on the account of a dead system.

> and (2) going Unicode means that all the existing APIs
> used by Emacs will have to be switched to Unicode. 

Why not do it piecemeal?  We can directly call Unicode APIs where
appropriate.